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The Sky's Excellent Path: A Concise Explanation of the Great Vehicle

Om delek su gyur chik!

The sun of wisdom shines in Dharmadhatu's sky,Light rays of love dispel the darkness of ignorance.To those who cause Dharma to flourish in the realms of wanderers—To the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the ten directions, I bow. (1)

Genuine reality transcends "top", "bottom", and directions,But through dependent imputation, "top", "bottom", and directions are imagined to exist.This way sentient beings engage in direct and inferential valid cognitionIs the basis of all conventions, all fabrications. (2)

Samsaric happiness and suffering, sentient beings' birth, death, and so forth,Have never existed in reality's basic nature,Yet they appear to exist, and the Buddha taught as if they did—This way of teaching is a method of getting beginners to enter the Dharma. (3)

Experiences of happiness and suffering that come from positive and negative actionsAre like dreams, illusions, and water-moons, the Buddha taught.Yet sentient beings think these are real because they directly experience them—This is nothing more than a confused way of relating to one's own karmic appearances. (4)

Past and future lives and the way of leaving one life and going to the nextHave no self-nature, like watermoons,Yet in order to counteract the view of nothingness,If beginners believe in them as being real, that is good. (5)

The difficulty of finding the freedoms and advantages, the impermanence of this life,The infallibility of cause and result, and the sufferings of samsara—These help beginners turn their minds away from samsara, and soThey are the vital preliminaries for all practices of meditation. (6)

Thinking of samsara's varieties of suffering is frightening,And when yearning for liberation arises,With a mind free of any doubts at allGo for refuge to the three supreme and undeceiving protectors. (7)

In order to make this the Great Vehicle's path,Cultivate great love, compassion, joy, and equanimity,And with these four immeasurables as the preliminaries,Give rise to the supreme mind turned toward supreme enlightenment—bodhichitta! (8)

Without wisdom realizing emptinessThere is no way to purify samsara's confused appearances.So with profound intelligence investigate, investigate, and meditateUpon the true nature of all phenomena, reality beyond concept. (9)

Meditating like this, one traverses the four levels of the path of junction, called:Heat, Peak, Patience, and Supreme Dharma.On each of these levels respectively, what remains is clinging to true existence that is gross, subtle, extremely subtle, and the mere appearance of duality—This is a path of ordinary beings. (10)

Then, at the end of the Great Supreme Dharma,Through the pacification of all signs of fabricationActual reality, Dharmadhatu, becomes manifest—This is the path of seeing, where the Noble Ones' grounds are reached. (11)

Completely Joyous, Stainless, Luminous, Radiant,Difficult to Overcome, the Manifest, Gone Far, Unmoving,Excellent Mind, and Cloud of Dharma—these are the ten grounds.They are divided into the seven impure grounds and the three pure ones. (12)

Generosity, ethics, patience, joyous diligence, concentration, wisdom, methods,Aspiration prayers, power, and original wisdom are the ten transcendent practicesWhen one connects the way they become more and more extraordinary over the ten groundsWith the ten chapters of Entering the Middle Way, that is excellent. (13)

Then, when the realization of the ten grounds is perfected,The remedy, the Vajra-like samadhi,Defeats dualistic appearances together with their imprints left in the mind,The abandonments and realizations are perfected, and Buddhahood is attained. (14)

The Buddhas' three kayas, five wisdoms, and so forth,The glorious abandonments for the benefit of self,And the glorious realizations for the benefit of others become manifest,And compassion perfected ensures that deeds benefitting others never cease. (15)

This brief explanation of the Great Vehicle's path and fruition,A gateway for fresh minds called The Sky's Excellent Path,From the wide open sky-path above the PacificShone from the radiance of Dechen Rangdrol's bliss-emptiness. (16)

Through this virtue may I and everyone with whom I have a connectionRipen our mindstreams on the Great Vehicle's pathAnd may the Great Secret Vehicle's profound generation and completion stagesBe a cause for our gaining Buddhahood in a single life! (17)

These were some extemporaneous words spoken in the expanse of sky above the Pacific while travelling from Australia to Thailand. December 2, 1998.Translated by Ari Goldfield.Translationcopyright 2012, Ari Goldfield.